In a few weeks, the flooding flow of swirling around the White House overwhelmed the pomber against corruption in American law and culture. There have always been rich donors, of course. But ten years ago, no one on earth had more than a hundred billion dollars. Now, according to ForbesAt least fifteen people have exceeded this brand. Since Trump took up his duties, the net value of Musk has gone from about ten billion dollars to more than four hundred billion.
The ultra-rich captured more American wealth than even the 19th century magnates of the golden age. Researchers who study inequalities as soon as the Neolithic period find it difficult to find previous. Tim Kerig, an archaeologist who directs the Alzey museum in Germany, said to me: “The people who built the Egyptian pyramids were probably in a less uneven society.” He suggested that the richest people today simply accumulate too much wealth for the system to contain. “Economic and technical evolution is much faster than social, mental and ideological evolution,” he said. “We did not have time to adapt to all these billionaires.”
Two decades ago, Jeffrey Winters, professor of political science at the Northwestern University, began teaching a course called Oligarchs and Elites. His students at the time considered this exotic terrain. One of them protested: “Russia has oligarchs. America has rich people. ” But over the years, winters have noticed a change in its students, accelerated by the decision of the Supreme Court, in 2010, to remove the limits of political contributions. “The challenge has really become convinced that the United States was still a democracy,” said Winters. “They argued that the oligarchs dominated everything that matters.”
Many Americans today marry two apparently opposed feelings towards the very rich: resentment and aspiration. In a Harris survey in 2024, fifty-nine percent of respondents said that billionaires make society more unfair, and an almost identical number said they hoped to become billionaires themselves. There is a growing feeling that only those who belong to the club can prosper. New investment vehicles allow people to copy the portfolios of the members of the Congress, on the theory that legislators have an advantage that the rest of us did not do. Rapper Kendrick Lamar obtained his status as a liberal icon using the Half Bowl show at halftime to protest the injustice of American life. He also published an ode to “more money, more power, more freedom”, which focuses on the refrain “I deserve everything”.
Winters, looking through history, believes that the United States has reached “advanced oligarchic power”, an era when “the rules of the political process allow wealth to shape the results and the agenda”. He added: “It is undeniably visible now that it is no longer possible to say that we have rich people and other countries have oligarchs.”
“Maybe the walls of the gallery should be left to the galleries.”
Cartoon by William Haefeli
The oligarchy, in the formulation of Aristotle, is “when property men have the government in their hands”. It is a model as old as civilization. In ancient Mesopotamia, those who master irrigation have raised more cultures and therefore more power. Later, the kingdom’s room was livestock; In the old Englishman, the word feoh meant both “cattle” and “wealth”. (You can always hear a trace of this story in the English word “feudal”.) The first oligarchs did not appreciate the calm lifestyles. As the anthropologist Timothy Earle writes, leaders of this type “are rarely died in bed; They were killed in battles of rebellion and conquest or were murdered by their close affiliates. ”
In the book by Winters “Oligarchy”, he offers a typology. Medieval Europe was torn apart by violent competitions between the “at war” oligarchies, in which each baron had its own castle, soldiers and territory. These provisions (practiced later in certain Bastions of the New Jersey Mafia) were costly and stressful, they therefore tended to evolve towards “governing” oligarchies, in which the participants agreed to repress their weapons and to govern collectively. It was generally a more profitable situation, until the members of the coalition could no longer resist fighting.
The emerging United States had its own share of oligarchs because the vote was reserved for white men who held property. But it was a “civil” oligarchy, in which the richest citizens supported the state, because it protected their interests and because they benefited more from the rule of law. If the rule of law collapses, however, a civil oligarchy can become an “sultanist” oligarchy, in which the ultra -rich consent to be governed by one of their own – a “chief oligarch”, in the sentence of Winters.
Ferdinand Marcos, the president of the Philippines, from 1965 to 1986, was stolen until 1986. On an official salary of $ 13,500, he obtained his family at least four skyscrapers in Manhattan and a set of paintings from old masters. His wife, Imelda, was known to have raised thousands of pairs of shoes – a habit so distinctive that few people remember that she also tried to buy Tiffany & Co.
As Winters notes, oligarchs in this category govern “fear and rewards”. Marcos has mastered the business community in strategic deployment of permits and in difficulty. He made a special example of Eugenio Lopez, the richest man in the country and the owner of the Manila ChronicBy breaking an empire estimated at four hundred million dollars. After a few years, there were few boundaries between the president’s financial assets and the country. Marcos gave the sugar industry to one of his former brotherhood brothers and gave the banana sector to another friend. While Marcos’ friends have poorly managed their assets, the country has broken in its worst recession since the Second World War.
The chief oligarchs do not like to retire, because civil life makes them vulnerable to the remuneration of those they have ejected from their club. But in 1986, after three years of public demonstrations, the Marcoses fled in exile, with a jewelry plan, silver and gold bars. Over time, their allies rewritten enough history so that, after the death of Ferdinand, Imelda was able to return home and were finally elected to the Congress. In 2022, after an incessant disinformation campaign that threw the Marcos years as a “golden age”, their son became president. Their perfidy is commemorative in the English language, however. Alfred McCoy, historian of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said to me: “Marcos’ corruption led to the creation of the term” crony capital “. It is a useful term to describe the Trump era. »»
While Trump’s second term was taking shape, he rarely lacked a chance to remind Americans the powers at his disposal, to reward and to punish. The new president of the FCC, Brendan Carr, who demonstrated his loyalty by wearing a gold -shaped gold in the shape of a Trump head, launched surveys on all large broadcasting companies – with the exception of Fox. He rejected the supportive suggestions by saying, “If you are a broadcast and you do not want to serve the public interest, you are free to put your license and you can go podcast.”
Shortly after, Trump pardoned a billionaire colleague, Trevor Milton, a manufacturer of electric cami, found guilty of investors’ fraud. (In a promotional video, Milton had presented an excess speed prototype that was in fact downhill.) Milton and his wife had donated $ 1.8 million to Trump’s campaign and hired a lawyer who was the brother of the Trump prosecutor, Pam Bondi. Pardon spared him of restitution payments estimated at six hundred and ninety million dollars. Trump said Milton had been targeted for his political opinions. Speaking of him in the third person, the president said: “He supported Trump, he loved Trump. I didn’t know him, but he loved him.”
Trump’s executive branch – The government version – has not wasteped time to help Musk companies. The Commerce Department is considering its Internet Starlink service for an expansion of forty-two billion dollars of rural broadband; The Ministry of Defense can enlist SpaceX to help build a missile defense project called Golden Dome. Musk, in turn, found moments when his business needs to align with Trump’s political needs. As a major recipient of Pentagon contracts, Musk has given himself a particular interest in defending the appointment of Pete Hegseth, former host of Fox News, as defense secretary. After senator Joni Ernst, an Iowa republican, expressed doubts about Hegseth, a political group linked to Musk, broadcast digital advertisements against her. Ernst fell online.
But not everyone was ready to comply. On April 7, when a cold rain fell on Washington, a few hundred people gathered in a ballroom at the hotel near Dupont Circle, in a spirit of mixed resistance. Patriotic millionaires, a prosperous American company concerned about the rise in inequalities, met to discuss, as the conference banner said, “how to beat the Broligarques”. This being Washington, the decorations presented an eagle in flight, but, unlike the eagle on the insignia of the Executive Branch Club, he tightened photos of Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg, dressed in tuxedos.